Undergone and Underwent and How to Love People through Dough

This piece is a contribution to STSC Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this upcoming issue is Work. This piece is longer than my usual 500 words. . . giving leniency for these Symposiums.

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I’m Benadryl-deep into an allergic afternoon, and it will be difficult to work in this blur. Work is a concept I’ve given little thought to beyond “having” it, “keeping” it, or “acquiring” it. Which I guess is quite a bit of thought actually. 

When we are children, the grown ups inquire of us “what do you want to BE when you grow up?” What they cunningly do not say is, “what work do you want to DO?” That’s the first trick played on us - we believe who we are is what we do; that doing is being.

As a kid I wanted to be an actor and a forensic scientist. 

As a teen I wanted to be an FBI agent and a mother. 

As a young adult I wanted to be a history professor, a wife, and a mother.

None of these professions came to fruition. 

And yes, marriage and parenting are professions, they’re just paid in the currency of emotion. 

One of the books in my mom’s library when I was young was a book called “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” by Studs Terkel published in 1974. I remember being enamored by the stories of taxi drivers and garbage men; their purpose and hard scrabble attitude hooked me. I could smell the midnight-colored mornings and meat hash breakfasts. Their lives felt important and weighty. Yet if I read the book now, wouldn’t I feel we’d been duped once again by a message that told people to make meaning of their toil?

Work came full circle for me when I opened a bakery at the age of 11 and then again in my late 30s. In the mid ‘80s, my friend Karli and I started Cakes on the Run, our little home cakery that specialized in foot delivery. Our parents didn’t want to drive us around for groceries or deliveries, so we’d walk down the hill to the grocery story for supplies, only to return with a sanctioned grocery cart and deliver cakes by hand. It didn’t last long, but I came across the file for our flyer a few months ago and was impressed that we didn’t miss the mark on marketing, which is as important as location. 

Two-and-a-half decades later I owned and operated Two Birds Bakery with one of my favorite humans, Megan. For years, people referred to us as The Birds. Whoever had the morning shift was called Early Bird, while the other was called Late Bird. Friends would say “if you’re late bird, you should come to our show tonight.” While I could put together some killer logos on our new portable Macintosh as a kid, I left the logo work to Megan for Two Birds as she’s also a skilled and expressive artist. She included the rocket as an homage to me wanting to name our business Rocket Ship Bakery. The idea was nixed when more than one of our friends said it sounded like a place you take little boys for birthday parties or haircuts.

Notice our logo above, Megan is the tall, regal redheaded peacock and I’m the squat wise brown-haired owl. Our bakery was “ours’ - so distinctly us that I understand why - much to the chagrin of actual parents - business owners refer to their ventures as their children.

Baking for work is characterized by exhaustion and low-pay. There is no romance in it. After the allure of opening had worn off, and we were stuck in the sling of repetition, Megan started to sense my disillusionment. She said to me one day, in all her observant astuteness, “I don’t think this job is stimulating enough for you.” She supported my attempts to keep myself engaged and didn’t bat an eye when I’d sculpt erotic forms from sugar cookie dough and stage scenes with our mascot dolls.

Mascot Dolls

But after too many years of too much work for too little pay, we both decided to close up shop. Shuttering a business you’ve built, that is loved and supported by others, is more heartbreaking than I care to go into. I will say tho that there is a strange egoic humiliation to it and it makes all the moments of joy that preceded it feel bittersweet - much like I can’t separate Juan’s life from his dying, I can’t separate the bakery from its closing. 

Want is dissolved by doing so I can’t say I ever wanted to be a baker so much as I’ve been a baker twice.

During the years Two Birds was open, I loathed baking off the clock and never baked at home. My tiny kitchen was a pain to bake in compared to our expansive open plan bakery that was flooded with natural light and the lingering scent of cinnamon all day, and awash in the milky glow of pendant lamps in the darkness of early mornings or late nights.

Years have passed now tho and I find myself in the squeeze of our small kitchen baking often. Ever since Jim moved to the Midwest he’s been looking for a specific roll for his favorite seemingly-easy sandwich. For years I’ve been picking up “kaiser rolls,” and “round rolls,” and “hard rolls,” none of which have hit his niche. When one recent night he was researching rolls and realized the roll he longed for is called a Kummelweck roll. By the next afternoon, I’d whipped up a batch of those fluffy seed-encrusted babies and he’s been in sandwich heaven ever since.

As an aside on babies and dough, whether sweet like cinnamon or savory like Kummelweck, the ideal roll dough should feel akin to fat baby skin. That’s when you know the dough is ready, when you begin to miss the infants.

Up until Jim quit smoking, we had a summer evening routine of walking to the convenient mart where he’d get smokes and a slushy, and I’d tag along for the companioning. One night as a couple kids were riding bikes in the parking lot, Jim stopped one of them, fiddled with the brake cable, then stood back and said “try it now.” The kid was ecstatic. “This is the best it’s ever been!” Apparently his cables were twisted or something. . . I don’t really know because Jim is the bike mechanic and I didn’t learn to ride a bike until I was 40.

Even tho Jim has repaired bikes five to six days a week for nearly a quarter of a century, he still stopped on his off-hours to offer ride-changing help to a kid who didn’t know he needed it. This is natural for Jim; he loves to help and he loves to excel. He never cuts corners whereas I will make a sloppy circle just to avoid the work of making a perfect square.

I handed his slushee back to him, my lips stained cherry. His still unlit cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth - the last remnant of a town of devoured Doozers.

The Ones who Love to Work.

The Fraggles weren’t my jam, instead I preferred the earlier work of Henson; the violent Wilkins coffee commercials and the explosive IBM commercial.

Juan’s Instagram account still exists, and his profile still reads: 

“I cannot say why I am good at what I do, but I can say that I work very hard at it.” ~ Jim Henson

Years ago I submitted a piece of art to a group show on the theme of Work. I layered my collage on a plat map. Being an environmental consultant for nearly 15 years left me with a heaping supply of engineering drawings. The collage featured a moveable watercolor hand grasping a stationery watercolor cock. Pull the tab attached to the hand and boom, you’ve got interactive art.

I titled the piece, “It takes more work to love myself than to love you.”

I’d say that’s true to this day but I spent years loving people the wrong way; the easy way.

The way I wanted to love them, not the way they needed or wanted to be loved.

A solipsistic fantastical relentless sort of love.

A style of loving that helps no one. A masturbatory sort of amor that leaves one person satisfied and everyone else sticky and searching for washcloths.

Over a decade later and now I work harder on my art and harder at loving people well. The most difficult yet most important work we do is loving others. Now, I am less about gifts and words and more about action and ears. I am less impatient fixing and more patient presence. Finally, I am Being instead of Doing.